


Mass Effect: Terminus Earth Edition

by HarlequinR



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Terminus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-06 06:01:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12205284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarlequinR/pseuds/HarlequinR
Summary: Astrographic 180, Sol is now a Terminus system. Let the fun start.





	1. The Terran Commonwealth. pre contact

Originally founded in the early 2090's in the shadow of widespread upheavals, the Commonwealth was an exercise in hope over expectation. The latter 21st century had seen a steady decrease in the gap between the richest and poorest nations as well as a growing trend in public opinion against centralisation of national power. The combination created a setting with intense political and economic competition between increasingly small bodies, to the point where some central governments eventually ceased to possess meaningful power at all. At its height this would result in the breakup of the PRC into more than a dozen coastal city-states and a largely ungovernable interior.

From the point of view of being a stabilizing influence it failed abjectly, as a unifying force it succeeded in spite of itself. Limited consensuses were worked out through bickering towards common purpose as much as traditional negotiation. The results were messy and uneven in places, but it worked. And at the time that it worked at all was enough. From the original, mutilated excuses for international policy that were produced the world was brought into a broadly accepted state of coordination. The process wasn't pretty to watch and several statelets were hammered back into line when they diverged past the patience of their peers, often at the end of convulsive bushfire wars.

Despite, or because of, this economic growth and scientific advancement continued. A global legal unity was hashed out that left a lot of interpretation in the hands of local judiciary but was nominally guaranteed everywhere. Free movement of people was achieved through fiat of the people rather than policy, in response to the competition for skilled employees and the limited means to stop migration. Slowly the world became a better place to live, but it got there kicking and screaming.


	2. First Contact, Almost

_From interviews with Sebastian Glade, Operational Liaison (ret.), Black Flag freesail company, previously of the Commonwealth Navy._  
  
First contact? Well, that was very 'terminal', as you kids like to say. And it needs a bit of background so don't be rushing me. We'd known for a while that something was up with Charron, same type of readings as the ruins on Mars. But seeing it explode into gravel just when we were thinking about investigating it? Scary stuff for people and no mistake.  
  
Bear in mind we only had a dozen military ships in operation at the time, operating out of one station that did combined duty as shipyard, naval academy and military HQ. If the idiots on the other side hadn't shot each other out of the skies before coming through we would not be sitting here today, and no word of lie. Remember those were Alpha series antiques. Centrifugal gravity, 1C maximum speed and a single axial accelerator cannon with rack mounted missiles.  
  
Back on Earth it was like someone had kicked a hornet's nest, but you've got people that were there that can tell you about that. For those of us at the business end of things it was all action stations while making sure none of the private players did something silly like go near it. They did get their act together pretty quick all things considered, which was good for the fleet since we saw annual budget growth like nothing on Earth, literally ha ha. Long story short, two years later the science guys had worked out how it worked and the techs were building the prototype of the Gamma series, which were the first thing we'd designed that could be called a proper warship by anyone else's standards. Now I was what we called at the time a 'veteran', though in real terms most green ensigns these days will have seen more action than we had. But it did mean I was posted to the Cronus when they decided to see what was on the other side.  
  
So there was us, four Betas and a pair of survey ships. We went through on full alert, ready for flight of fight at the first sign of trouble. And it turns out there's no one there, which was good or bad depending on your point of view. What we did find was wreckage, which we later discovered was from the the ships that activated our relay before destroying each other. Not the first people to find it either since it didn't take an engineering degree to tell where bits had been cut out. Now, here's the nub. They might have stripped out what they thought of as the good bits but for us, anything was the good bits. We called in the mining people and they just dragged the biggest bits away whole, while the tech crews checked out the smaller sections in EV suits. Now as you know there wasn't anything special or outstanding to be had ,technology wise, but all the little things they got off them added up. Slightly better ways to do this or make that and what have you.  
  
Better than that however, we now knew where we were in the grand scheme of things. Astrographic maps of the local cluster extracted, and eventually decrypted, from the navigational drive showed us who was nearby and where other relay took you. Of course we locked the relay down as tight as we could on our side. We knew we were years away from standing confidently next to the people that built the ships we salvaged but they gave us a benchmark to aim for and time to build ourselves up.


	3. First Contact, Actual

_From interviews with Sebastian Glade, Operational Liaison (ret.), Black Flag freesail company, previously of the Commonwealth Navy._  
  
So, fast forward ten years and we reckoned it's time to introduce ourselves to the neighbours. Mainly because we're in a position where they'll probably take us seriously, and better us going to them than have unexpected guests ourselves.  
  
The build up was the type of thing that needs to be seen to be believed. Engineers and designers went through a design prototype every two years for six years until they settled on the Zeta series as one they were happy to bulk build without it going obsolete the next year. Most of the changes were to do with how we used eezo, and remember as well we only had a set total amount to use for everything across the board. No native sources so the cache on Mars was it, and if there was a way to economise on use we were finding it.  
  
The Zetas were built in the new shipyards over Mars, production line style. We nicknamed them the pine cones on account of the overlapping armour plates which were meant to be quick and easy to replace in the field. Also made it harder to hit the drive ports without a strait shot into them and when you need to move the whole ship to do most of your aiming that was a priority. Great ships compared to what we'd been used to, all the design features we think of as normal these days were innovations at the time. Circular bridge, distributed crew quarters and all the rest. Combat capabilities were nothing to sneeze at either. Three accelerator cannons with early 'ripper' rounds, about the same damage capacity as a single mass accelerator proper on that scale of ship, and two auto-loading missile drums. Story worth hearing, the standard procedure of locking down the blast doors in a ship before going into combat started off as a way of minimising decompression if the hull got breached. Not enough eezo spare to fit shielding to the fleet so it was bound to happen once we got in a firefight.  
  
We choose the Garem system simply due to it being nearby, no other reason. Two relay jumps and we arrived without meeting a soul on the way. We'd been leapfrogging them for safety: three though to check out the other side while the diplomatic ship stayed with the other three, one back to give the OK them all through together, repeat as needed. Never realised at the time that the colony was as good as we could have asked for contact wise, not xenophobic, not a slaver den, not at war with a neighbour. Both us and them were handling things with kid gloves, though for different reasons as it turned out. To be honest you can only stay excited for so long before sitting around waiting for the diplomats and translators to do their thing gets boring. Things had gone smooth enough we were told and it was time for tea and meals back at the Keep, didn't even get a chance to find out what they looked like before we left. Worth saying as well, that was also our first bit of interstellar commerce too, not the treaty they harp on about in the schools. 1 kg of platinum for the translation matrices for the five most common languages in the region. Robbed us blind.  
  
Looking back I do remember thinking that the ships we saw were a bit...rough. Like knock off copies of high end products I'd seen on the grey market when I was a kid in Container City. And there was a lot of gossip in the upper ranks about how an economy that size was supporting as many ships as we saw, but you know how that turned out for them. Was our first clue about the state of things across most of the Terminus, though we didn't know it at the time.


End file.
